9



The Well and S t a r s

*



How the Ladder Disappeared



The sky was already bright at something after five in the morning, but even so, I could make
out a lot of stars overhead. It was just as Lieutenant Mamiya had told me: from the bottom of
a well, you can see stars in the daylight. Into the perfect half-moon slice of sky, faintly
glowing stars were packed neatly, like specimens of rare minerals.
Once before, when camping on a mountaintop with some friends in the fifth or sixth
grade, I had seen stars in such numbers that they filled the sky. It almost seemed as if the sky
would break under the weight of all those things and come tumbling down. Never had I seen
such an amazing skyful of stars. Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled
out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would
trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made
me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpow-
ering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until
that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that
would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken
it for granted. But in fact, the earth was nothing but a chunk of rock floating in one little
corner of the universe: a. temporary foothold in the vast emptiness of space. It-and all of us
with it-could be blown away tomorrow by a momentary flash of something or a tiny shift in
the universe's energy. Beneath this breathtaking skyful of stars, the uncertainty of my own ex-
istence struck me full force (though not in so many words, of course). It was a stunning
discovery for a young boy.
Looking up at the dawn stars from the bottom of a well was a special experience very
different from looking at the full, starry sky on a mountaintop, as if my mind-my self-my very
existence-were firmly bonded through my narrow window to each one of those stars in the
sky. I felt a deep sense of intimacy toward them: they were my stars, visible to no one but me,
down here in the dark well. I embraced them as my own, and they in turn showered me with a
kind of energy and warmth.
As time passed and the sky came increasingly under the sway of the bright morning sun of
summer, one star at a time would obliterate itself from my field of view. They did this with
the utmost gentleness, and I studied the process of obliteration with wide-open eyes. The
summer sun did not, however, erase every star from the sky. A few of the strongest ones
remained. No matter how high the sun climbed, they took a stubborn stance and refused to
disappear. This made me very happy: aside from the occasional cloud that drifted by, the stars
were the only things I could see from down there.
I had sweated in my sleep, and now the sweat was beginning to grow cold and chill me. I
shuddered several times. The sweat made me think of that pitch-dark hotel room and the
telephone woman there. Still ringing in my ears were the words she had spoken-every one of
them-and the sound of the knocking. My nostrils retained the strangely heavy smell of
flowers. And Noboru Wataya was still talking from the other side of the television screen. The
memory of these impressions remained, undimmed by the passage of time. And this was
because it had not been a dream, my memory told me.
Even after I was fully awake, I continued to feel an intense warmth in my right cheek.
Mixed in now with the warmth was a mild sensation of pain, as if the skin had been chafed
with rough sandpaper. I pressed my palm against the spot through my one-day stubble, but
this did nothing to reduce the heat or the pain. Down in the bottom of the dark well, without a
mirror, it was impossible for me to examine what was happening to my cheek.
I reached out and touched the wall, tracing the surface with my fingertips and then


pressing my palm against it for a time, but I found nothing unusual: it was just an ordinary
concrete wall. I made a fist and gave it a few taps. The wall was hard, expressionless, and
slightly damp. I still had a clear impression of the strange, slippery sensation it had given me
when I passed through it-like tunneling through a mass of gelatin.
I groped in my knapsack for the canteen and took a drink of water. I had gone a full day
now without eating. The thought itself gave me intense hunger pangs, but these began to fade
soon enough as they were absorbed into a limbo-like numbness. I brought my hand to my face
again and tried to gauge the growth of my beard. My jaw now wore a day's worth of stubble.
No doubt about it: a whole day had gone by. But my one-day absence was probably not
having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I
could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the
slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear:
no one needed me.
I turned upward again and looked at the stars. The sight of them gradually calmed the
beating of my heart. Then it occurred to me to grope along the wall for the ladder. Where it
should have been, my hand encountered nothing. I felt over a broad area, checking with the
utmost care, but there was no ladder. It no longer existed in the place where it belonged. I
took a deep breath, pulled the flashlight from the knapsack, and switched it on. But there was
no sign of the ladder. Standing, I shone the light on the floor and then the wall above me, as
far as the beam could reach. The ladder was nowhere. Cold sweat crept down my sides like
some kind of living creature. The flashlight slipped from my hand, fell to the ground, and
switched off from the impact. It was a sign. In that instant, my mind snapped: it was a grain of
sand, absorbed into the surrounding darkness. My body stopped functioning, as if its plug had
been pulled. A perfect nothingness came over me.
This lasted perhaps a few seconds, until I retrieved myself. My physical functions returned
bit by bit. I bent over and picked up the flashlight lying at my feet, gave it a few taps, and
switched it on again. The light returned without a problem. I needed to calm myself and put
my thoughts in order. Fear and panic would solve nothing. When had I last checked the
ladder? Yesterday, late at night, just before I fell asleep. I had made certain it was there and
only then let myself sleep. No mistake. The ladder had disappeared while I was sleeping. It
had been pulled up. Taken away. I cut the switch of the flashlight and leaned against the wall.
Then I closed my eyes. The first thing I felt was hunger. It swept toward me out of the
distance, like a wave, washed over me soundlessly, and glided away. Once it was gone, I
stood there, hollow, empty as a gutted animal. After the initial panic had passed, I no longer
felt either terror or despair. Strangely enough, all I felt at that moment was a kind of
resignation.



Back from Sapporo, I held Kumiko and comforted her. She was feeling lost and confused.
She had taken the day off from work. "I couldn't sleep a wink last night," she said. "The
clinic had an opening at just the right time, so I went ahead and decided by myself." She cried
a little after saying this.
"It's finished now," I said. "No point thinking about it anymore. We talked it over, and
this was how it worked out. If there's anything else you want to talk about, better do it here
and now. Then let's just put it out of our minds. Forget about it. You said on the phone you
had something to tell me."
Kumiko shook her head. "Never mind," she said. "You're right. Let's forget about it."
We went on with our lives for a while, avoiding all mention of Kumiko's abortion. But
this wasn't easy to do. We could be talking about something entirely different, when suddenly
both of us would fall silent. On weekends, we'd go to movies. In the dark, we might be


concentrating on the movie, but we might just as well be thinking about things that had
nothing to do with the movie, or we might be resting our brains by thinking about nothing at
all. I knew that Kumiko, sitting next to me, was thinking about something else. I could sense
it.
After the movie, we'd go somewhere for a beer or a snack. Sometimes we wouldn't know
what to talk about. This went on for six weeks-a very long six weeks, at the end of which
Kumiko said to me, "What do you say we take a trip tomorrow, go away for a little vacation,
just the two of us? Tomorrow's Friday: we can take off till Sunday. People need that kind of
thing once in a while."
"I know what you mean," I said, smiling, "but I wonder if anybody at my office even
knows what a vacation is."
"Call in sick, then. Say it's flu or something. I'll do the same."
We took the train to Karuizawa. I picked that destination because Kumiko said she wanted
a quiet place in the mountains where we could walk all we liked. It was off-season there in
April; the hotel was hushed, most of the shops were closed, but that was exactly what we
wanted. We did nothing but go out for walks every day, from morning to evening.



It took a full day and a half for Kumiko to release her feelings. And once she did, she sat
in the hotel room, crying, for nearly two hours. I said nothing the whole time, just held her
and let her cry.
Then, little by little, in fragments, she began to tell me things. About the abortion. About
her feelings at the time. About her extreme sense of loss. About how alone she had felt while I
was in Hokkaido-and how she could have done what she did only while feeling so alone.
"And don't get me wrong," she said finally. "I'm not regretting what I did. It was the only
way. I'm perfectly clear on that. What really hurts, though, is that I want to tell you
everything-absolutely everything-but I just can't do it. I can't tell you exactly how I feel."
Kumiko pushed her hair up, revealing a small, shapely ear, and she gave her head a shake.
"I'm not hiding it from you. I'm planning to tell you sometime. You're the only one I can
tell. But I just can't do it now. I can't put it into words."
"Something from the past?"
"No, that's not it."
"Take all the time you need," I said. "Until you're ready. Time is the one thing we've got
plenty of. I'll be right here with you. There's no rush. I just want you to keep one thing in
mind: Anything of yours-anything at all, as long as it belongs to you-I will accept as my own.
That is one thing you will never have to worry about."
"Thank you," she said. "I'm so glad I married you." But we did not have all the time I
thought we had. Exactly what was it that Kumiko had been unable to put into words? Did it
have something to do with her disappearance? Maybe, if I had tried dragging it out of her
then, I could have avoided losing her now. But no, I concluded after mulling it over: I could
never have forced her. She had said she couldn't put it into words. Whatever it was, it was
more than she had the strength for.



"Hey, down there! Mr. Wind-Up Bird!" shouted May Kasahara. In a shallow sleep at the
time, I thought I was hearing the voice in a dream. But it was not a dream. When I looked up,
there was May Kasahara's face, small and far away. "I know you're down there! C'mon, Mr.
Wind-Up Bird! Answer me!"
"I'm here," I said.


"What on earth for? What are you doing down there?"
"Thinking," I said.
"I don't get it. Why do you have to go to the bottom of a well to think? It must be such a
pain in the butt!"
"This way, you can really concentrate. It's dark and cool and quiet."
"Do you do this a lot?"
"No, not a lot. I've never done it before in my life-getting into a well like this."
"Is it working? Is it helping you to think?"
"I don't know yet. I'm still experimenting."
She cleared her throat. The sound reverberated loudly to the bottom of the well.
"Anyway, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, did you notice the ladder's gone?"
"Sure did," I said. "A little while ago."
"Did you know it was me who pulled it up?"
"No, that I didn't know."
"Well, who did you think did it?"
"I didn't know," I said honestly. "I don't know how to put this, but that thought never
really crossed my mind-that somebody took it. I thought it just disappeared, to tell you the
truth."
May Kasahara fell silent. Then, with a note of caution in her voice, as if she thought my
words contained some kind of trap for her, she said, "Just disappeared. Hmm. What do you
mean, 'it just disappeared'? That, all by itself, it... just... disappeared?"
"Maybe so."
"You know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's kinda funny for me to bring this up now, but you're
pretty weird. There aren't too many people out there as weird as you are. Did you know that?"
"I'm not so weird to me," I said.
"Then what makes you think that ladders can just disappear?"
I rubbed my face with both hands and tried to concentrate all my attention on this
conversation with May Kasahara. "You pulled it up, didn't you?"
"Of course I did. It doesn't take much brainwork to figure that one out. I did it. I sneaked
out in the night and pulled the ladder up."
"But why?"
"Why not? Do you know how many times I went to your house yesterday? I wanted you
to go to work with me again. You weren't there, of course. Then I found that note of yours in
the kitchen. So I waited a really long time, but you never came back. So then I thought just
maybe you might be at the empty house again. I found the well cover half open and the ladder
hanging down. Still, it never occurred to me you might be down there. I just figured some
workman or somebody had been there and left his ladder. I mean, how many people go to sit
in the bottom of a well when they want to think?"
"You've got a point there," I said.
"Anyhow, so then I sneaked out at night and went to your place, but you still weren't
there. That's when it popped into my mind. That maybe you were down in the well. Not that I
had any idea what you'd be doing down there, but you know, like I said, you're kinda weird. I
came to the well and pulled the ladder up. Bet that gotcha goin'."
"Yeah, you're right."
"Do you have anything to eat or drink down there?"
"A little water. I didn't bring any food. I've got three lemon drops,
though."
"How long have you been down there?"
"Since late yesterday morning."
"You must be hungry."
"I guess so."


"Don't you have to pee or anything?"
Now that she had mentioned it, I realized I hadn't peed once since coming down here.
"Not really," I said. "I'm not eating or drinking much."
"Say, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, you know what? You might die down there, depending on my
mood. I'm the only one who knows you're in there, and I'm the one who hid the rope ladder.
Do you realize that? If I just walked away from here, you'd end up dead. You could yell, but
no one would hear you. No one would think you were at the bottom of a well. I bet no one
would even notice that you were gone. You don't work for any company, and your wife ran
away. I suppose someone would notice eventually that you were missing and report it to the
police, but you'd be dead by then, and they'd never find your body."
"I'm sure you're right. I could die down here, depending on your mood."
"How do you feel about that?"
"Scared," I said.
"You don't sound scared."
I was still rubbing my cheeks. These were my hands and my cheeks. I couldn't see them
in the dark, but they were still here: my body still existed. "That's because it hasn't really hit
home with me," I said.
"Well, it has with me," said May Kasahara. "I bet it's a lot easier to kill somebody than
people think."
"Probably depends on the method."
"It'd be so easy! I'd just have to leave you there. I wouldn't have to do a thing. Think
about it, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Just imagine how much you'd suffer, dying little by little, of
hunger and thirst, down in the darkness. It wouldn't be easy."
"I'm sure you're right," I said.
"You don't really believe me, do you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? You think I couldn't do
anything so cruel."
"I don't really know," I said. "It's not that I believe you could do it, or that I believe you
couldn't do it. Anything could happen. The possibility is there. That's what I think."
"I'm not talking about possibility," she said in the coldest tone imaginable. "Hey, I've got
an idea. It just occurred to me. You went to all the trouble of climbing down there so you
could think. Why don't I fix it so you can concentrate on your thoughts even better?"
"How can you do that?" I asked.
"How? Like this," she said, closing the open half of the well cover. Now the darkness was
total.